TE-greedy-nester: structure-based detection of LTR retrotransposons and their nesting.

MOTIVATION: Transposable elements (TEs) in eukaryotes often get inserted into one another, forming sequences that become a complex mixture of full-length elements and their fragments. The reconstruction of full-length elements and the order in which they have been inserted is important for genome and transposon evolution studies. However, the accumulation of mutations and genome rearrangements over evolutionary time makes this process error-prone and decreases the efficiency of software aiming to recover all nested full-length TEs. RESULTS: We created software that uses a greedy recursive algorithm to mine increasingly fragmented copies of full-length LTR retrotransposons in assembled genomes and other sequence data. The software called TE-greedy-nester considers not only sequence similarity but also the structure of elements. This new tool was tested on a set of natural and synthetic sequences and its accuracy was compared to similar software. We found TE-greedy-nester to be superior in a number of parameters, namely computation time and full-length TE recovery in highly nested regions. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: http://gitlab.fi.muni.cz/lexa/nested. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Correction to: Nested plant LTR retrotransposons target specific regions of other elements, while all LTR retrotransposons often target palindromes and nucleosome-occupied regions: in silico study.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s13100-019-0186-z.].

Nested plant LTR retrotransposons target specific regions of other elements, while all LTR retrotransposons often target palindromes and nucleosome-occupied regions: in silico study.

BACKGROUND: Nesting is common in LTR retrotransposons, especially in large genomes containing a high number of elements. RESULTS: We analyzed 12 plant genomes and obtained 1491 pairs of nested and original (pre-existing) LTR retrotransposons. We systematically analyzed mutual nesting of individual LTR retrotransposons and found that certain families, more often belonging to the Ty3/gypsy than Ty1/copia superfamilies, showed a higher nesting frequency as well as a higher preference for older copies of the same family ("autoinsertions"). Nested LTR retrotransposons were preferentially located in the 3'UTR of other LTR retrotransposons, while coding and regulatory regions (LTRs) are not commonly targeted. Insertions displayed a weak preference for palindromes and were associated with a strong positional pattern of higher predicted nucleosome occupancy. Deviation from randomness in target site choice was also found in 13,983 non-nested plant LTR retrotransposons. CONCLUSIONS: We reveal that nesting of LTR retrotransposons is not random. Integration is correlated with sequence composition, secondary structure and the chromatin environment. Insertion into retrotransposon positions with a low negative impact on family fitness supports the concept of the genome being viewed as an ecosystem of various elements.